Beta Release of Hamara Sugam 2.0

Greetings everyone, on the 9th of June we presented to you, the Alpha release of Hamara Sugam 2.0 . Now we are excited to present to you the Beta Release of Hamara Sugam. Hamara Sugam is the lighter version of Hamara Linux targeted at computers with low computing resources. It utilizes the MATE desktop Environment which works great on systems which are low on computing resources. It is also simple to understand and use for people with any level of expertise with computers from newbies to pro users alike.

The detailed changes and bugs which were resolved during migration of Hamara Sugam from Alpha to Beta stage can be seen in the detailed changelog in the Release Notes Document. The most notable of these changes are as follows:

Moving towards Calamares installer for installation of Hamara Sugam.

We realized that Debian installer is a great installer with detailed options for installation of an operating system. At the same time Debian installer is sometimes confusing for newbies who are trying to do installations. Many times even for those with some experience. This led us to consider alternate installers. We tried to port the most famous of them all Ubiquity. But after a lot of tries with it we abandoned the effort on Ubiquity,due to many technical reasons. That is when we discovered Calamares. The Distribution independent Installer. And we integrated it with Hamara Sugam.

Calamares is an easy to use installer providing the options suitable for newbies as well as for people who want to do fine grained configurations while installing the operating system on there machine.

Changes to the theme of Hamara Sugam

We migrated to the Materia theme for the Hamara Sugam Desktop. Previously we were using Paper theme. We identified issues in GTK 2 environments when using Paper and found that Materia gave a more fluid and slick Material Design experience. Although our GTK theme has now shifted to Materia, we are still using Paper as our default icon theme.

We thanks nana-4 for his efforts on Materia theme & Sam Hewitt for his efforts on Paper theme.

Generic Names for Applications

We decided that Applications should have a generic name, based on there purpose. With this opinion, we renamed a few applications. So MATE terminal becomes just Terminal or MATE color chooser becomes just Color chooser and like wise. All this naming has been done to make sure the application names should be generic wherever possible.

Update to Linux Kernel 4.12

Although our immediate upstream Debian is using the Linux Kernel version 4.9 we would be using the recent Linux Kernel version 4.12 instead.